Electronic kiosks primarily provide a specially-targeted product or service. For example, a movie ticket kiosk can sell movie tickets at a theater. Likewise, an Internet kiosk can provide pay-as-you-go Internet access at airports and malls. Purchases through such kiosks are often made using a credit card. Generally, kiosks can provide automated service to consumers and minimize labor costs for the service provider.
However, many consumers do not have credit cards and, therefore, kiosks that accept currency can service individuals that cannot pay by credit card. Some kiosks can accept both credit cards and currency. Nevertheless, for cost reasons, many kiosks do not include or use coin acceptors or dispensers or even paper currency dispensers. Therefore, when a transaction involves currency, a problem can arise when the amount of currency input to the kiosk exceeds the price of the product or service purchased—what can be done with the resulting “change” amount? Existing kiosks fail to provide an adequate solution to this problem. For example, in one approach, the kiosk does not dispense any change whatsoever and the consumer loses the entire change amount.